Caption Gaffe

0 Shares

In a New York Times Op-Ed, Dutch photojournalist Hubert Van Es reminisces about his work at the very end of the Vietnam War. It is an interesting perspective on a series of images he made under a great amount of stress.

What is particularly of interest is that the captions that accompanied Van Es' images of the helicopter flying off with Vietnamese refugees were incorrectly edited. By the time the images were published world-wide it had come to be known as the helicopter that launched off of the US Embassy in Saigon. Van Es swears that the helicopter actually had landed on top of an apartment building that housed a CIA official.

Despite the incorrect caption, the images have stayed in our collective imagination as a symbol of the US defeat in Vietnam. While mistakes are made I have to wonder what images from Iraq can we expect to be incorrectly captioned, especially when the media is herded [nay, embedded] from one area of the country to another in some unqualified military formation.